News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

lightandlight

Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen on Monday November 02, 2026 @09:57PM (#50347457)
I pointed Opus 5.5 (medium reasoning) at the paper, and after a bit of mucking around, instructed it to port the Astra weights for the breakout policy to JavaScript logic. According to its own evaluation, it succeeded. Then I got it to minify the JavaScript policy. The final result is 346B, compared to around 3KB for the (sparse) weights generated by Astra.

    function policy(x){for(var i=100,p,b,t,s,c,r,a,h,M=Math.tanh,R=v=>v<0?-1-v:v>9?19-v:v;i--;)x[i*6]&&(p=i%10),x[i*6+3]&&(b=i),x[i*6+4]&&(t=i);r=b/10|0;c=b%10;s=c>t%10||c==t%10&&c<9?1:-1;a=R(c+s*(8-r));t=t/10|0;h=1e3*M(.02*((r>t||r==t&&r-8?r<6?a:(a+R(c+s*(9-r)))/2:R(c+s*(r+9-2*(r<2?0:r<4?r:4))))-p));return[0,30*M(-h-15),-100,30\*M(h-15),-100,-100]}
https://claude.ai/share/7a931d7a-0acd-402d-a5a5-a9d44d9d0385

Maybe the models have a common internal representation for computations, and they're capable of consuming and producing computations in the syntax of neural network weights?

Re:SOML – A Config Format for Humans on Monday November 02, 2026 @08:34PM (#50346860)
> All decisions are human-made

I believe you, but it's hard to tell when prose reads like something Claude generated.

LLMs make it so easy to blurt out hundreds of thousands of LOC with no effort. Too much to assess critically. So I've formed new heuristics for judging whether a project is worth my attention. One of those is LLM-flavoured prose, which I have come to view as a signal of low effort.

Re:SOML – A Config Format for Humans on Monday November 02, 2026 @02:43PM (#50342559)
Ironically the project seems LLM-generated.

I don't want to read Claude's interpretation of why your project matters. I want you to tell me directly.

Re:Someone behind the software on Sunday October 18, 2026 @03:29PM (#50144450)
I agree, and this is why I dislike A/B testing for product development. It replaces the "someone" with vague broad appeal or rogue optimisation forces.
Re:Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men on Saturday October 17, 2026 @01:27AM (#50128216)
I think the "what" is way less important than the "how". I think "how to live a fulfilling life" has general principles that apply to everyone, but the results of applying those principles are different for everyone.

I think the core of it is: following my intuitive sense of "rightness" across time scales (seconds to decades). When I'm doing it, I feel peace, joy, contentment, and my life seems meaningful. When I'm not doing it, I feel dissatisfied, restless, and nihilistic.

I'm frustrated by how vaguely and abstractly I'm conveying this. But this intuitive rightness thing precedes language. It's like a bodily sense or an emotion, but deeper. Have you ever put a t-shirt on backwards and only noticed because something didn't feel right? Then you take it off and put it on the right way around, and it just feels right. It's a bit like that but for life in general.

I can give some examples of "what" I've done if you like but I'll leave them out of this comment.

> "living a fulfilling life" means other trade offs, and potential losses.

Part of how I know I'm doing the thing is that the trade-offs and losses don't concern me. If Y matters to me, and X really is necessary to have a life with Y, then I do X. X is simply the price of having Y, which I'll gladly pay.

In contrast, when I feel resentful of a price I'm paying, it's evidence that I'm not following my sense of rightness.

Re:Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @05:30PM (#50095615)
> I've lost a lot of my spark in the past 6 years as well.

I felt similarly and had a "crisis" point at the start of 2025. I realised that living a fulfilling life had to become my top priority, no matter how difficult or uncomfortable it may seem. Otherwise, I might not survive another 30 years.

Now I can see a bit of the mechanism behind the dimming of the spark. I had gradually conceded the direction of my life to external forces, and let anxiety and self-doubt drive my decisions. It's a great way to end up with a life that you don't want. I shudder to think of what it's like to do that for 20 years instead of 5.

Re:Fancy Curl Sites on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @04:57PM (#50095124)
Yeah, I like this more. I want curl/wget to get the canonical representation by default.
Re:Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening on Monday October 05, 2026 @08:14PM (#49972532)
I'd also like the same thing for televisons.
Re:Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model on Saturday October 03, 2026 @05:46AM (#49942751)
Great article! You've pinned down a bunch of intuitions that have been floating around my head lately. I especially liked the Ahmdahl's law reference.
> I've learned a lot about using a tool like this but the biggest result is that development has lost its joy. There were no challenges, there were no puzzles, no hurdles to overcome. The biggest lesson is that software development is now about the destination not the journey, the journey is for the agent.

Which is why I minimise my use of these tools. I'm not going to delegate the fun/meaningful parts to a machine.

Re:Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher on Monday September 14, 2026 @05:55AM (#49694331)
Thanks!
Re:Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher on Sunday September 13, 2026 @07:54PM (#49690046)
Do you have a link to that video?
Re:Select * from Internet.blogposts on Friday August 28, 2026 @01:01AM (#49474536)
> The web is a few dozen companies, each holding a filing cabinet, each with a receptionist posted out front. He'll read you one file at a time, but only files you can name, as fast as he cares to read, and as long as his boss allows.

Fortunately this isn't true. Social media consists of a few big walled gardens, but the web itself is still open. Go forth and create a website!

Re:Saying 'Google It' Makes You Sound Old on Sunday August 02, 2026 @07:33PM (#49149483)
Yeah, I used to Google things until Google went to shit. Now I use Kagi, but it doesn't sound like a verb. I'll gladly add "search [it] up" to my lexicon :)
Re:Ten Steps Towards Happiness (2015) on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @06:32AM (#49004522)
I learned about 0mq a few years back, found myself wondering why it had such an air of quality. Then I found Hitnjens' writing, only to learn that he had been gone for a while. I was surprised by my sense of loss.
Re:A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering on Saturday July 18, 2026 @12:36AM (#48955261)
> Good luck standing out universe filled with AI slop apps.

This was written sarcastically, but I'm optimistic. The more crap that's out there, the more refereshing and noticeable it is when something is good.

Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? on Saturday June 13, 2026 @06:32PM (#48522156)
I'm learning operating system fundamentals by writing baremetal code for my Raspberry Pi.

My medium term goal is to draw a cursor and move it using a mouse.

I recently got the USB host driver to the point where it could recognise port connects/disconnects. Enumerating USB devices involves some waiting, so I decided to work on concurrency support so that the USB driver wouldn't block the rest of the system. This week I got preemptively scheduled threads working (super fun stuff).

Now I'm trying to make the driver code more self-contained by keeping the driver's message queue on its stack. I'm not sure if it's a good idea. I'll play around with it for another day or two and then get back to USB enumeration.

Re:Show HN: Crazierl – An Erlang Operating System on Sunday March 29, 2026 @06:56PM (#47568327)
> browser-based demo

Wait, so is the browser running a JavaScript build of Qemu? /

Re:The 49MB Web Page on Sunday March 15, 2026 @06:45PM (#47392803)
> Reddit, HN

Hacker News still has a feed (that's the only reason why I saw this thread). And Reddit gives you a feed for your subscribed subreddits.

> The commit activity might look unusual because I worked in very intense 12h/day sprints over 14 days.

That's a weird way to put it.

The commit activity looks unusual because it's a completed project whose files were individually committed in alphabetical order. There's no development history.

Good to see more hobby OS projects. I'm almost due to start another round of learning this stuff.

What have been the most helpful reference materials so far?

What's the most memorable challenge you overcame?

What's the coolest or most surprising thing you learned?

Re:Why Objective-C on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @05:07AM (#47230420)
> Reading all the really, super old documentation that explains entire subsystems in amazingly technical depth

Any links?

> Maybe this is also why Smalltalk fiends are such fans.

I started getting interested in Smalltalk after I tried writing a MacOS program by calling the Objective-C runtime from Rust and had a surprisingly good time. A Smalltalk-style OO language feels like a better base layer for apps than C.

Re:Vibecoding #2 on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @09:23AM (#46706108)
> do you think there's any appetite in people paying for this type of tool which lets you spin up infra on demand and gives you all the capabilities built so far?

(I'm not the author) The easiest way to charge for this kind of software is to make it SaaS, and I think that's pretty gross, especially for a CLI tool.

> I'm skeptical and I may just release it all as OSS

It doesn't have to be one or the other: you could sell the software under libre[1] terms, for example.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

Re:Why is SendGrid emailing me about supporting ICE? on Friday January 09, 2026 @02:53PM (#46558420)
I often go one step futher by appending a short random identifier, `{service}.{id}@{domain}`, to make it harder to guess (in case someone learned of my email address policy).

I created a little GTK program to help: https://github.com/LightAndLight/gen-alias

Re:A website to destroy all websites on Thursday January 01, 2026 @07:45PM (#46460035)
I'm with you. Surprised by the negative reactions here.

A possible piece of the puzzle: I originally read the article on mobile, no issues. Then I opened it on my desktop, and found the design quite jarring. The margins are much too large for my taste, forcing the text into a single narrow column, and the header animations were distracting and disorienting (fortunately the page works perfectly with JavaScript disabled). Perhaps this triggered people?

Show HN: Request sensitive user input from system services

https://github.com/LightAndLight/asker

`asker` allows daemons to request user input.I run Syncthing to keep my KeepassXC in sync across devices. At the same time I have `syncthing-merge`[1] running to handle any conflicts due to concurrent database edits. It calls `keepassxc-cli merge` to merge conflicting databases, which requires my database password. `syncthing-merge` runs as a system service under its own user, so I wasn't able...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
This year I moved off LastPass, and started using [Syncthing](https://syncthing.net/) to sync my [KeepassXC](https://keepassxc.org/). It works pretty well, but doesn't have any automatic conflict resolution (I've been working on [something](https://github.com/LightAndLight/syncthing-merge) for this).

Next up I'm moving my TODOs off Todoist to something local-first, and plugging that into my Syncthing setup.

Re:Teaching feed readers about YouTube subscriptions on Wednesday July 02, 2025 @05:11PM (#44448885)
Right, and [kjkjadksj says](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445957) a similar thing:

> If you have a feed reader system there is no need to subscribe [via YouTube] in the first place. You’ve obviated that system.

This approach works, and it's a great way to subscribe to public channels without a YouTube account. The main reason I'm not doing it is that I want to subscribe via YouTube.

> It would be great if it was more discoverable

Oh, hopefully there's a browser extension that detects feeds on a page and lights up and provides a menu. Shame that the YouTube mobile app isn't similarly extensible.

Re:Teaching feed readers about YouTube subscriptions on Sunday June 29, 2025 @07:03AM (#44412110)
I wrote a program that exposes my YouTube subscriptions as a news feed. It's seriously a relief to finally have this stuff show up in [my feed reader](https://www.newsblur.com).

It's not a "Show HN" because there's no way for others to try it (yet).

Some things I'm curious about:

* Is anyone else here doing something similar?

* Would anyone like to use this service?

* Are there other YouTube-meets-news-feed features that you'd love to see?

Older »